But while the emphasis was on race and ethnicity, the message was not directed at minority voters (whom the Bush camp would have to effectively disenfranchise in order eventually to steal the election). ‘What the Republicans are doing is aimed more at white Americans,’ said David Bositis, a political analyst at the Joint Centre for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. ‘Moderates do not want someone who’s negative on race. It says something very significant about America as a whole.’ Race had simply become a signifier of their desire to look like they were not mean-spirited.

They call this ‘diversity’. A decent idea – that an institution should look like the people it serves and the world in which it operates – that has spawned an industry of consultants, advisers, quangos and departments that between them have corporatised identity beyond all meaning. Having eviscerated the issue of representation from all notions of fairness, equality and justice, equal opportunities morphs effortlessly into photo opportunities – a way of making things look different and act the same. It is what the radical black activist Angela Davis once described to me as ‘the difference that brings no difference, the change that brings no change’.

‘The Republican administration is the most diverse in history. But when the inclusion of black people into the machine of oppression is designed to make that machine work more efficiently, then it does not represent progress at all,’ Davis told me. ‘We have more black people in more visible and powerful positions. But then we have far more black people who have been pushed down to the bottom of the ladder.’

When it comes to issues of identity and politics we have a serious discursive problem. Put bluntly we have failed to find a way to talk intelligently, honestly and progressively about how human diversity, and the experiences that come with it, relate to our politics.

Labour’s token contest

In few places has this been clearer recently than in the battle for the Labour leadership. Faced with the prospect of four white men duking it out, in the final days before nominations closed the party resolved that a black woman, Diane Abbott, should be allowed to compete. This was neither presented nor understood as an attempt to combat racism or sexism in the party but openly conceded as a desire to appear less racist and less sexist. Not to act different but to look different. Not equal opportunities but photo opportunities.

This kind of tokenism inevitably creates cynicism. When the Labour hierarchy conceded Abbott’s inclusion they were keen to look different even as they carry on acting the same. This alienates many white people who feel someone has gained advancement on purely racial grounds that would not be open to them, even as it gives nothing to black people.

This is not the fault of Diane Abbott. She had every right to stand, to get nominations where she could and to set out whatever stall she pleases. She cannot be held responsible for the patronising motivations for those who backed her for poor reasons, any more than any other leadership candidate. I am glad she is there. She is as capable, intelligent and talented as any of those she is up against and her reception at many of the hustings suggests her views are more in tune with mainstream Labour Party members than her challengers.

Unfortunately, however, Abbott has occasionally played up to it, pointing at her challengers and saying: ‘Look at my running mates. If you vote for them it will be the same old same old.’ It gets some laughs. But it also offers hostage to fortune, for it works just as well for Sarah Palin or Condoleeza Rice. There is nothing inherent in any racial category or gender that makes it necessarily more radical than another and no intrinsic link between black and female advancement and black and female electoral representation.

Widening gap

Since Barack Obama was elected in the US the gap between black and white has widened. Unemployment is still rising among African Americans and stands at almost twice that of white people. For black teens, unemployment is 43.8 per cent. Meanwhile, home foreclosures among African Americans are increasing almost 50 per cent faster than for whites.

Six of the countries that rank in the top 20 for women’s representation are also in the top 20 for per capita rapes. Meanwhile, a global gender gap index, compiled by the World Economic Forum, which assesses how countries distribute resources and opportunities between the sexes, reveals glaring discrepancies. Angola and Nepal, which stand 10th and 17th respectively in terms of representation, are 106th and 110th in terms of equality. Ireland and Sri Lanka, which rank eighth and 16th respectively for equality, are 87th and 125th for representation. In 2008, two female party leaders locked horns in elections in Bangladesh, producing the country’s second female prime minster in a decade. Yet according to the WEF, gender inequality in Bangladesh is bad (it is 94th) and getting relatively worse (in 2008 it was 90th).

This does not undermine the campaigns for more diverse political representation but should sharpen the arguments that support them. Representative democracies that exclude large sections of the population are not worthy of the adjective.

Nor should the power of symbolism be underrated. Black Americans may have fared worst under Obama, but they are also the most likely to approve of his presidency. A Pew survey released in January showed the highest ever number of African Americans believing they are better off now than they were five years ago – even though economically they are not.

The fact that five of the 10 countries with the highest female representation are in the top 10 for gender equality is also no mere coincidence. Since the push for parliamentary parity is often part of a larger effort surrounding equal rights, greater representation is more likely to be the product of progressive social change than a precursor to it. The relationship between identity, representation and equality is neither inevitable nor irrelevant, but occasionally contradictory and always complex.

Where Abbott is concerned, the problem is a Labour Party that did manage to recruit and stand large numbers of women and black people over the past 25 years but then singularly failed to promote any of them to the point where they might be broadly considered for a leadership role without condescension.

These two trends were not accidental. During the mid-1980s there was a concerted political push from the left and the then Labour Party Black Sections to get black MPs into parliament. This resulted in the election of four in 1987 – one of whom was Abbott. That trend continued, albeit slowly, to the point where we now have 15 non-white MPs. A similar push from the left to ensure greater female representation included all-women shortlists, which helped propel a significant number of women into parliament.

Both of these initiatives were opposed at the time by the Labour leadership, although they were happy to take credit for the achievements once they had happened. And when they were there, both black people and women found it very difficult to penetrate an incredibly white and macho leadership culture. This was not simply a matter of looking different. Since the campaign to get more black and female MPs had originated on the left, many of the MPs those campaigns produced came from the left. As Labour drifted to the right there was little scope for advancement within its ranks.

This internal stasis left Labour drawing not only from a demographic gene puddle but an ideological one as well. The problem of ideological diversity and gender and racial diversity did not just coincide – they were intimately interlinked. Where Abbott is concerned this is particularly ironic because her primary contribution to the debate has not been her melanin content or hormonal composition but her anti-war, anti-racist stance that has forced the consideration of a far more progressive agenda onto the contest.

Critical mass

This makes sense. Notwithstanding Angela Davis’s comments, the fact is that our differences do often make a difference. While there may be no singular, definitive black or female experience, evidence suggests that a critical mass of certain groups can have an effect on outcomes. A 2008 study in the Colombia Law Review discovered that ‘when a white judge sits on a panel with at least one African American judge, she becomes roughly 20 percentage points more likely to find [a voting rights violation]‘. A 2005 Yale Law Journal study revealed not only that women judges were more likely to find for plaintiffs in sexual harassment cases than men but that the presence of female judges increased the likelihood that men would find for the plaintiff too.

One doesn’t need a overly fertile imagination to appreciate how different our race and immigration policies might have been if parliament had not been all white for almost 60 years between 1929 and 1987, or how gender equality issues might have been dealt with if the Commons had ever been more than 10 per cent female before 1997.

One would expect that the importance of such perspectives would be readily recognised on the left. After all, it is there that great strides were made from the 1960s onwards thanks to the advances of civil rights, gay rights, feminism and anti-colonialism. But by the early 1990s large parts of the left had come to regard the politics of identity as an obstacle to further progress rather than an opportunity for it. ‘Identity politics’ – which after a while began to mean whatever you wanted it to mean so long as you didn’t like it – was blamed for having created an atomised, sectarian culture on the left that had simultaneously elevated individuals who traded on guilt while relegating the possibilities for real solidarity and electoral victory.

‘The vanguard, without question, is the identity movements; people are identified and described as representatives of this or that community, and these are the categories in which people reflexively think,’ argued Michael Tomasky in Left for Dead. ‘With tiny constituencies come tiny ideas. Very little has emerged from today’s left except agendas pursued mainly on the basis of group membership and mainly through the law and the courts, rather than through the broad-based moral suasion of the public.’ 

In Europe, in particular, Enlightenment values have been evoked as a bulwark against multiculturalism in general and political Islam in particular. Communist deputies in France called for the banning of the burqa; Labour politicians in England called for an end to multiculturalism; anti-immigrant rhetoric and Islamophobia were deployed in defence of gay rights and feminism with considerable force.

In Holland a government video showing gay men kissing and topless bathers, introduced with the specific aim of testing Muslim attitudes, was made compulsory viewing for all would-be immigrants. ‘We have lots of homo-discrimination,’ explained Dutch Labour MP Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who sits on the parliament’s immigration committee. ‘Especially by Muslim youngsters who harass gay men and women on the streets. It is an issue here.’ 

Given that almost all religions have a reactionary attitude towards women’s equality and gay rights, efforts to draw attention to the tension between protecting religious freedom and defending human rights should be welcomed. But to single out Islam alone, at a time when the Church of England was bitterly divided over gay clergy and the Catholic church was reeling over child sex abuse, seemed perverse.

The audience for these broadsides against the Muslim community was anything but universal and the effect was not more equality but less. Far from encouraging greater integration – the professed aim of this rhetoric and the politics it embraces – these attacks further bolstered nationalism and xenophobia, thereby isolating a relatively small, poor minority during a time of war, terrorism and escalating racism. And as the hostility increases so does the currency of fundamentalists, who are given the opportunity to present themselves as the staunch defenders not of dogma but community. After a Labour minister criticised his Muslim constituents for coming into his office wearing the niqab both racial attacks against Muslim women and sales of the niqab rose.

Identity and class

For others on the left the journey into the more vague area of identity marks so great a departure from the hallowed class struggle that they are simply unable to take it seriously. Orthodox Marxists believe anyone who has been distracted by the fickle matters of gender, ethnicity, race, religion – basically anything that cannot be reduced to the relations of production – has essentially been duped.

They have half a point. To the extent to which class is about the distribution of resources, there is very little in politics that makes sense without understanding its class dimension. But similarly there is very little that makes sense when viewed only through the prism of class.

So while it might be true that the powerful exploit difference in order to divide the powerless and thereby strengthen their grip, it is no less true that the powerful did not invent difference and oftentimes need do little to keep it alive. Otherwise the only way to explain poor white Republicans or Hindu nationalists is as people who don’t understand what’s best for them.

‘The anguish and disorientation which finds expression in this hunger to belong, and hence in “the politics of identity” … is no more a moving force of history than the hunger for “law and order”, which is an equally understandable response to another aspect of social disorganisation,’ writes Eric Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism. ‘Both are symptoms of sickness rather diagnoses, let alone therapy.’ This would be news to Zimbabwe’s Shona, Serbian nationalists and British jihadis – to mention but a few – who have ‘moved history’ in ways that have little connection to the therapeutic.

None of us comes to politics from a vacuum – we each arrive with affiliations that mould our worldviews. ‘Every human being at every stage of history is born into a society and from his earliest years is moulded by that society,’ argues E H Carr in What is History. ‘Both language and environment help to determine the character of his thought; his earliest ideas come to him from others. His earliest words come to him from others. The individual apart from society would be both speechless and mindless.’

But we are not bound by those worldviews and have the capacity to make connections and effect solidarity beyond our own experience. ‘To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle of public affections,’ wrote Edmund Burke in Reflections on the French Revolution. ‘It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.’

Gary Younge’s latest book Who Are We? is published by Viking

‘The other books didn’t have the visceral impact, but Soledad Brother was just something I could relate to completely. I felt I knew the man,’ Bennett recalls. ‘There were all kinds of recognisable elements in our struggle. The most powerful part was the way he conducted himself in the jail … It was about dignity. Never, ever folding or letting threats from the jailers make you collapse … It was about being principled, dignified and resistant. I tried as best as I could to replicate that attitude of no compromise, resistance and the emphasis they put on solidarity. Strong standing up for the weak.’

Bennett had never met a black person. Indeed, the only ones he’d ever seen had been those serving in the British army. Nonetheless, as an Irish Catholic in occupied Ulster, black America loomed large in his life. ‘From a very early age my family had supported Martin Luther King and civil rights,’ he says. ‘We had this instinctive sympathy with black Americans. A lot of the iconography and even the anthems, like We Shall Overcome, were taken from black America. By about 1971 or 1972, I was more interested in Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver than Martin Luther King.’

For most of the last century, progressives and the oppressed around the world have looked to black America as a beacon – the redemptive force that stood in permanent dissidence against racism at home and imperialism abroad. ‘No African came in freedom to the shores of the New World,’ wrote nineteenth-century French intellectual Alexis de Tocqueville. ‘The Negro transmits to his descendants at birth the external mark of his ignominy. The law can abolish servitude, but only God can obliterate its traces.’ That “external mark” has acted like a passport to an outside world that ostensibly distinguishes black America from the rest of the country and its policies.

When Kwame Nkrumah came to power in a newly independent Ghana, he sent for black American intellectual W E B Du Bois to edit the Encyclopedia Africana and Paul Robeson to take up the chair of music and drama at Accra University. Even as colonial France massacred Algerians by the score, it opened its arms wide to the likes of Josephine Baker, James Baldwin and Richard Wright. For some time during the 1980s and 1990s, Jesse Jackson acted as a rogue ambassador, parachuting into trouble spots and freeing hostages.

This affinity found potent expression in sport and popular culture too. For most of the last century, there was an organic connection between black artists and the aspirations of African-Americans and other oppressed minorities. Their songs, like Sam Cooke’s Change Is Gonna Come and McFadden and Whitehead’s Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now, provided a soundtrack for a generation of liberation politics (not to mention Barack Obama’s campaign). In sports, Tommie Smith and John Carlos greeted The Star-Spangled Banner from the Olympic podium in Mexico City in 1968 with their clenched fists. Their protest has resonated across nations and ages. Margaret Lambert, a Jewish high jumper prevented from competing in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, told National Public Radio (NPR) last year how delighted that protest had made her feel.

Then there was the inimitable Muhammad Ali. ‘We knew Muhammad Ali as a boxer, but more importantly for his political stance,’ says Zairean musician Malik Bowens in the film When We Were Kings. ‘When we saw that America was at war with a third world country in Vietnam, and one of the children of the US said, “Me? You want me to fight against Vietcong?” It was extraordinary that in America someone could have taken such a position at that time. He may have lost his title. He may have lost millions of dollars. But that’s where he gained the esteem of millions of Africans.’

By the beginning of the new millennium, however, black America’s most globally prominent faces were singing and rapping about getting rich. They were playing golf and tennis and staying clear of political controversies that might threaten their record-breaking endorsement deals. And in the figures of Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, they were representing the most reactionary US foreign policy in at least a generation. When Secretary of State Powell addressed the Earth Summit in Johannesburg in September 2002, he was jeered. A year earlier, when he refused to show up at a United Nations anti-racism summit after the United States resisted all talk of reparations for slavery and stifled criticism of Israel, the cartoonist for the South African newspaper Citizen ridiculed him: ‘Coming Uncle Tom?’ asked two characters representing participants at the conference. ‘De Massa in de big house says I ain’t,’ responds a Powell dressed up as a house servant.

‘Would they vote for him? Would they kill him?’

To the world, black Americans were looking and sounding increasingly like the rest of America – for better or worse.

But on November 4, 2008, black America was once again the toast of the world. Throughout the Caribbean, radios blared Mighty Sparrow’s calypso hit Barack the Magnificent; firecrackers went off in El Salvador; Liberians danced in the street. The Times of London’s front page showed a picture of Obama below the words ‘the new world.’ The Sun, Britain’s top-selling daily tabloid, showed Obama under the headline ‘One Giant Leap for Mankind.’

In the tiny Romanian village of Rusciori, Obama Sorin Ilie Scoica was born on election day. ‘When I saw Obama on TV, my heart swelled with joy. I thought he was one of us Roma because of his skin color,’ said Maria Savu, the baby’s grandmother, who hoped his name would bring him luck. In Ghana, John Atta Mills, an opposition candidate running on an agenda of change, produced posters of himself standing next to a life-size cutout of Obama. In Brazil, at least eight black candidates took advantage of a quirk in electoral laws so they could stand as ‘Barack Obama’ in elections in October.

America had a black leader, and suddenly everybody else wanted one. Or at least they wondered how they could get hold of one. Political conversation in France, Britain and Germany, in particular, went almost effortlessly from how to keep immigrants out to how descendants of (mostly) immigrants could ascend to the highest office in the land – or why they could not. ‘America is a new world again,’ said Rama Yade, junior minister for human rights and France’s only black government member. ‘On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.’ Cem Özdemir, the first politician of Turkish descent to lead a German political party, was not holding his breath. ‘In Europe there is still a long way to go,’ he told Der Spiegel. ‘The message is that it’s time to move on in Europe. We have to give up seeing every political figure from an ethnic minority as an ambassador of the country of his forefathers.’

In almost every instance the simple, honest answer to the question ‘Could it happen here?’ was no. The Obama story was indeed about race. But at its root it was essentially about white people. Would they vote for him? Would they kill him?

‘Millions of whites cannot reconcile in their minds with the idea that a black man with his wife and children would move into the White House,’ argued Fidel Castro. He was right. It just turned out not to make any substantial difference, since those millions of Americans could not bring themselves to vote for any Democrat. It’s not clear whether white Europeans would be any more comfortable with electing a black leader in their own countries than some Republicans were here. Having basked in a smug state of superiority over America’s social, economic and racial disparities, Europeans were forced by Obama’s victory and the passions it stoked to face hard realities about their own institutional discrimination, which was not better or worse – just different.

With the exception of the Roma in eastern Europe, levels of incarceration and deprivation of non-white people in Europe have not reached the level of African-Americans here (although the descendants of Bangladeshis in Britain and Algerians in France come close). Black Europeans enjoy little in the way of black American success. Individuals may break through, but there is nothing on the scale of numbers or wealth comparable with the black American middle class.

Where are you from?

It only takes one, though. The question isn’t whether non-white Europeans are ready to run for national office but whether white Europeans would embrace them. Fascism is once again a mainstream ideology on the continent. When a black woman was chosen as Miss Italy in the mid-1990s, some officials complained that she was ‘unrepresentative of Italian beauty’, and the press crowned her ‘Miss Discord’. Poland’s foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, joked that Obama’s grandfather was a cannibal. Even though the overwhelming majority of non-white Europeans were born in Europe, the fact that they are descendants of immigrants excludes them from the European national stories, which are understood to have only white protagonists.

‘Where are you from?’ an administrator asked me at university in Edinburgh in what has long been a typical conversation.

‘Stevenage’, I told him, referring to my hometown thirty-miles north of London.

‘Where were you born?’

‘Hitchin’, I said, referring to the town nearby.

‘Well, before then?’

‘Well, there was no before then.’

‘Well, where are your parents from?’

‘Barbados.’

‘Ah, you’re from Barbados,’ he said.

To this day ‘immigrant’ and ‘non-white’ are often used synonymously in France. Indeed, given the conflation of immigration and race in Europe, the fact that Obama’s father was an immigrant was in some ways as significant as the fact that he was black. In that sense every country potentially has its Obama, depending on its social fault lines. For the broader symbolism of his win has less to do with race than with exclusion. Just take the group that in the popular imagination resides furthest from power, pluck one from its number, make him or her the national leader and you have an Obama story. In Bolivia it was Evo Morales, the first poor Amerindian to be elected; South Africa’s Nelson Mandela went from jail to president in just four years; in Sweden it could be a Finn; in Bulgaria it could be a Turk. Banel Nicolita, a Roma and member of Romania’s soccer team, has become known as ‘the Obama of Romanian football.’ For a man who is one of eight children raised in a mud house, the accolade could easily be translated as ‘a man of unlikely accomplishments.’ ‘Obama’s victory is a motivation for us,’ said Gruia Bumbu, chair of the National Agency for the Roma.

There was, of course, more to the euphoria over Obama’s victory than the question of exclusion – however and wherever it is framed. The defeat of the Republican agenda, with all the war and global havoc it has brought over the past eight years, was enough to make the world jump for joy. After Bush won in 2004, Britain’s Daily Mirror ran a headline saying, ‘Doh: 4 More Years Of Dubya … How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?’ The Guardian’s features supplement ran a page all in black with tiny words saying, ‘Oh My God!’ Many understand Obama as America’s belated but nonetheless more considered, less cavalier response to 9/11.

As one of the few members of America’s political class not tainted by the Iraq invasion, he appeared a thinker as well as a decider. Worldly where Bush was parochial, consensual where Bush was confrontational, nuanced where Bush was brash, he struck the outside world as though he regarded dialogue and negotiation as strengths rather than weaknesses. With his Kenyan roots, multiracial upbringing and childhood experiences in Indonesia, he also struck a more global figure. Of twenty-two countries polled by Pew Research last July, in only one nation, Jordan, did a majority say they had more confidence in McCain than in Obama. In the remaining twenty-one, nine (ranging from Tanzania to Japan) backed Obama by more than thirty points. In only six was the margin in single digits.

This enthusiasm was not spread evenly geographically. Western Europe (particularly France) was elated, while the Middle East was wary. ‘In these nations, suspicions of American power are pervasive and extend beyond President Bush’s personal unpopularity,’ argued Richard Wike of the Pew Global Attitudes Project. ‘Unlike in many other regions, in the Middle East there is little optimism about the post-Bush era.’ Nonetheless, with America’s international standing at an all-time low, a change of direction was generally welcome.

But while antipathy toward Bush and what he had done to the world explains the breadth of Obama’s appeal, it could never explain the depth. Relatives of mine in Barbados and Ireland followed the primaries closely. Children of friends at home in England asked if they could stay up to see the election results. They would never have done that for John Kerry. In the Pew poll, taken during the primary, respondents in Europe favored Obama over Hillary Clinton by significant margins.

‘The American Negro has no conception of the hundreds of millions of other non-whites’ concern for him,’ Malcolm X observed in his autobiography. ‘He has no conception of their feeling of brotherhood for and with him.’ And yet as Ronan Bennett’s account of his time in prison shows, the identification went beyond race. Which brings us back to Obama, whose central appeal was not so much that he looked like other Americans as that he sounded so different – and not just in comparison to Bush. For if Obama represents a serious improvement over his predecessor, he also stands tall among other world leaders. At a time of poor leadership, he has given people a reason to feel passionate about politics. Brits, Italians, South Africans, French and Russians look at Obama and then at Gordon Brown, Silvio Berlusconi, Thabo Mbeki, Nicolas Sarkozy and Vladimir Putin and realise they could and should be doing a whole lot better.

Much of this is, of course, delusional. People’s obsession with Obama always said more about them than him. Most wanted a paradigm shift in global politics, and, unable to elect governments that could fight for it, they simply assigned that role to Obama. His silence during the shelling of Gaza, however, was sobering for many. As a mainstream Democrat he stands at the head of a party that in any western nation would be on the right on foreign policy, the center on economic policy and the center-left on social policy.

Come inauguration day, that final symbolic set piece, the transition will be complete. The rest of the world must become comfortable with a black American, not as a symbol of protest but of power. And not of any power but a superpower, albeit a broken and declining one. A black man with more power than they. How that will translate into the different political cultures around the globe, whom it will inspire, how it will inspire them and what difference that inspiration will make will vary. From inauguration day people’s perceptions of Obama will no longer hinge on what he is but on what he does. While it’s unlikely that prisoners in Guantánamo have been passing around samizdat copies of The Audacity of Hope, Obama has already given Maria Savu a different understanding of what is possible for her grandson and maybe something for little Obama Scoica and the people of Rusciori to look up to.

Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the New York correspondent for the Guardian and the author of Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States (New Press).

This article first appeared in the February 2009 edition of The Nation

His supporters first got angry, and then got organised. They started a networking group on Obama’s own website opposing his new stance. The numbers swelled to 16,000. Twice the size of any other user-created site on his portal, it started slowing down traffic. The group’s open letter literally used Obama’s inspirational words against him. On the campaign trail he had repeated the late June Jordan’s dictum, ‘We are the ones that we have been waiting for’, to rouse his supporters into action. Now it was his detractors’ turn: ‘As you have said time and again senator, “We are the ones we have been waiting for”, and we are here, working to bring about real change in Washington.’ Obama responded, explaining his volte-face and saying he ‘expects to take his lumps’ on his site. A week later, with concern mounting that he was ditching his commitment to troop withdrawal from Iraq, he was forced to address the same constituency again.

Shifting to the centre

‘Look, let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the centre,’ he told a crowd gathered at a town hall-style meeting in Atlanta in early September. ‘The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me … And some of this is my friends on the left … ‘

‘I believe in a whole lot of things that make me progressive and put me squarely in the Democratic camp,’ he said. But, he noted, he does not believe that the active hand of government is a replacement, say, for parental responsibility in education. ‘I believe in personal responsibility; I also believe in faith,’ he said. ‘That’s not something new; I’ve been talking about that for years. So the notion that this is me trying to look’ – at which point he waved his hands around his head – ‘centrist is not true.’

There are two points about this exchange that are worthy of note. The first is that Obama believes he has ‘friends on the left’ who need addressing. For the best part of the past two decades the entire raison-d’etre of Democratic candidacies has been to demand a full-scale retreat from the left. Were this Bill Clinton or Al Gore (the candidate not the activist) they would have taken this an opportunity to trash the left and prove their centrist credentials.

The second is that there is a sizeable amount of active, critical support for Obama that is mobilised both for his election and for progressive politics. Where those two things appear to be in conflict they are at least as committed to the latter as to the former.

This is the most important and interesting thing about Obama’s candidacy so far – his relationship to his base.

Obama the candidate is a fairly mainstream, progressive Democratic Party figure. Much of the uncritical adulation heaped on him as the last great hope for the American left is quite misplaced. On the issues he must confront both at home and abroad his agenda is inadequate. At home, the economic situation is dire. One in seven US homeowners has negative equity – the biggest percentage since the Depression. Meanwhile, mortgage repossessions are at their highest rate since records began in 1979 and unemployment has leapt to its highest rate in five years. Obama’s economic policies will barely make a dent in a crisis of that magnitude.

Abroad, his plan to withdraw troops from Iraq is mitigated by his desire to send them to Afghanistan instead. The day after he clinched the nomination he went before the pro-Israeli lobby to declare himself a ‘true friend of Israel’ and promise that ‘Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided’. (This is astounding, given that Jerusalem is not the capital of Israel.) None of this will help the US fight terrorism, establish peace, improve its diplomatic standing or keep its citizens safe – all things that much of the electorate quite reasonably desire.

Given these shortcomings there are also some on the left who insist that to treat Obama’s candidacy as anything other than that of a mainstream Democrat is to indulge the euphoria of his fans: as his positions are no different to those of, for example, Kerry or Gore, he deserves no more investment or support. To pretend otherwise, they argue, is to set people up for disappointment.

The problem with this position is threefold. First, this is no ordinary time. Americans are desperate for a shift in direction. A culture not given to national malaise is seriously in the dumps. Just 15 per cent believe the country is on the right track, according to a recent poll – around a third of the figure following the election of Bush in 2004 – and almost half believe the country’s best days have been and gone. For the past 18 months almost every opinion poll that has asked Americans about their country’s direction has produced some of the most pessimistic responses on record – a more extended period than anyone can remember since Watergate. Inflation is up, real wages are down and, in the words of Gil Scott Heron, ‘common sense is at an all time low’.

Second, Obama’s detractors from the left need to show that they can come up with some alternative path that could galvanise so many people against the Bush agenda. The US left has been decimated over the past 30 years. It cannot be rebuilt by fiat, but only by a long and difficult process of engagement.

Third, Obama’s base is quite different both in composition and its level of involvement. During the primaries he managed to galvanise two dormant constituencies who between them create an almighty electoral bloc – black people and the young. His victory wasn’t solely down to them. But it was their unprecedented mobilisation that gave him the edge and literally transformed the electoral map by introducing new voters into the process who had previously remained aloof. Between them the young and the black increased their share of the Democratic primary electorate by 25 per cent this year compared with 2004. There is considerable leverage there that the party establishment cannot ignore.

Why they went for Obama, rather than Hillary Clinton, is not a mystery. But it was not obvious either. In the end he only beat her by 4 per cent of the vote. For African Americans there is a degree of racial solidarity – although that bond is not as automatic as many imagine. After eight years of Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, black Americans have recent, painful experience of those who look like them not representing their interests. Unlike Jesse Jackson, for example, Obama was not produced by the black community but presented to it.

It stands to reason, then, that their attitude to him was originally ambivalent but morphed first into race-pride when it was clear he had a chance of winning and finally into anti-racism as the Clinton campaign became more racially-divisive.

US presidential politics do not provide a huge amount of opportunity for thoroughgoing examinations of policies and platforms. Alongside the traditional demographic allegiances related to class, race and region, there is an indefinable element that both pervades and infuriates.

The appeal of any presidential candidate is based on a ‘gut reaction, unarticulated, non-analytical, a product of the particular chemistry between the voter and the image of the candidate’, argued Richard Nixon’s speechwriter Raymond Price. ‘[It's] not what’s there that counts, it’s what’s projected.’ And that projection, he continued, ‘depends more on the medium and its use than it does on the candidate himself’.

That element, carefully mediated through handlers, talking heads, talking points and marketing, won’t win it on its own. But without it, victory is tough. There was something about the stiff, studied demeanour of Gore or Kerry that was difficult for people to identify with, even if they are no more elitist than Bush and, in reality, probably a lot less so. Covering the 2004 elections, I never met a single person who was enthusiastic about Kerry. He received more votes than any Democrat in history because they hated Bush.

A marked and clear shift

Obama is different. There is a definite and deep connection. He is the only living politician I have seen emblazoned on t-shirts and with posters up in homes and stores, apart from Nelson Mandela during South Africa’s first elections in 1994. One crucial reason may be that he represents a marked and clear shift from the generation who have been misleading America for the past few decades in general and from Bush in particular.

To some he is the anti-Bush – conciliatory, worldly, curious and refined where the current president is belligerent, parochial, indifferent and oafish. The child of a single mother who worked his way up through community organising as opposed to the scion of a wealthy family who was handed it all on a plate.

Whatever the basis of the connection, the fact is that Obama’s candidacy has unleashed at least eight years of pent-up frustration at an administration hell bent on pilfering the US economy and debasing its constitution, and at a political class intent on abetting it. The Obama campaign likes to call its supporters a grass-roots movement. It is half right.

It is certainly grass-roots. Thanks in no small part to the campaign’s mastering of new technologies, the campaign has been able to draw in new people and involve them meaningfully at the most basic level. It has set up field offices in every state, has an impressive voter registration drive staffed primarily by volunteers and has a funding base that, while still reliant on money from huge corporations, has a broader base of small individual donors than ever before. Lots of ordinary people literally have a stake in his victory.

But it’s not a movement. At present Obama has galvanized two significant demographic groups and many others to back his candidacy. But his campaign has no purpose or meaning beyond his election. In its current form, once he wins or loses it will cease to exist. It operates not from the bottom up but from the top down. Yet, as the interaction over the spying bill suggests, this relationship is extremely fluid. The potential for his supporters exists in the very rhetoric and technologies he attracted them with in the first place.

We have been here before – and the lasting effects were important. When Howard Dean stood in 2004 his anti-war, web-based insurgency took the Democratic establishment completely by surprise. Dean lost. But his supporters continued with the mission of trying to reform and reinvigorate the party. His candidacy gave voice and force to a disparate group of activists, bloggers and other progressives who were opposed to the war and frustrated by the Democratic leadership’s reluctance to really push for an end to it.

Many of those who gathered around the Dean candidacy did not stop after he was ejected from the race, remaining instead to help build a sizeable and vocal progressive wing in the party that bore real results in 2006 when the Democrats took back both Houses of Congress. These are not social movements – their work is almost entirely limited to the Democratic Party. But nonetheless these campaigners have displayed a vibrancy and efficacy that would be the envy of the Labour left here in Britain.

Whether this will translate into electoral victory is an open question. John McCain, invigorated by the adoption of Sarah Palin as his running mate, and aided by the way this has helped to distance his candidacy from the Bush old guard, could certainly win. Some white people – more than admit it to the opinion pollsters – are still not prepared to vote for a black candidate. And who knows, until election day, how many black people, young people and Latinos – historically three of the least likely groups to turn out but also the bedrock of Obama’s base – will actually show up and vote? Obama’s aim is to win by expanding and transforming the electorate through voter registration. If they turn out he could take it by a landslide, but if they stay at home then he could be crushed.

Obama had a commanding 59-32 per cent lead among Latinos according to polls in early September (Bush took 44 per cent of the Latino vote in 2004). For all the hoopla about the nomination of Sarah Palin, moreover, he continued to lead McCain by seven points among women (Kerry beat Bush by just three points).

Obama needs 18 more electoral college votes than Kerry mustered to take the presidency. As the conventions drew to a close there were two states that Kerry won where Obama was facing a serious challenge – New Hampshire (four electoral college votes) and Wisconsin (ten votes). There is one state – Iowa (seven votes) – that Bush won narrowly where Obama now has a commanding lead. Overall most of the states in contention are ones that Bush won and McCain must defend while Obama is on the attack.

Win or lose, the transformation that so much of Obama’s base seeks in US foreign policy, economic direction and civil liberties cannot be achieved by votes alone. If he loses his supporters must be there to mobilise against any attempt to build on the Bush agenda, just as the Christian right was there to block progressive measures under Bill Clinton. If he wins they will need to exercise sufficient leverage for him to realise the limits to what he can concede to lobbyists, the military and big business without losing the support of his base.

The potential to expand and build a broad progressive front to check and reverse the reactionary excesses of the past eight years has opened up as a result of Obama’s run for office. To achieve their goals, his supporters must not stand still after election day.

Furman is a Democrat Leadership Council (DLC)-style Democrat, someone out of the Clinton-Rubin summer school. [Rubin was Clinton's treasury secretary and the DLC is a corporate-funded association of Democrat moderates, closely associated with the Clintons.] He joins Austin Gouldstein as Obama’s chief economic advisor. Gouldstein is famous for eulogising Milton Friedman, and for having been the top DLC economist.

Among that collection of ghouls, Obama recently announced his appointment of foreign policy advisors. They include former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously said that half a million dead Iraqi children killed by the sanctions imposed by the Clinton administration was a price worth paying. They also include Lee Hamilton and David Boren, two Congress people known for their protective attitude toward the CIA; Anthony Lake, Clinton’s national security advisor; and Susan Rice, another Clinton leftover and cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq.

I can’t say that I was surprised by any of these appointments, because I never doubted that Obama would be anything but a loyal servant of the empire, but it shouldn’t get past anyone that thought he represented a fresh start.

I think that there is no doubt that the lust for Obama, the mania that he has inspired, the departure from rationality and critical thinking, does represent some fantastic longing for a better world, more peaceful, egalitarian and humane. He is not going to deliver much on that, but there is some evidence of an admirable, popular desire behind the crush, and those desires will never leave disappointed. But, as I have argued for many years, there is great political potential in disillusionment with Democrats.

The working class are really, really pissed off at their standard of living, and the way that the rich have got more than the rest of us. I don’t think that Obama’s administration would do much to change that. But never did that possibility of disappointment offer so much hope. That is not what Obama means when he uses that word, but I think history can be a great artist.

Gary Younge Doug Henwood’s analysis would work best if Obama was standing in Sweden, or some other place where there was a large left wing that could support him wanting to turn left. He isn’t, he is standing in America and, for the best part of eight years, it has seen of one of the most reactionary governments that we have had for some time. You have to deal with the reality that exists, rather than one that you would like.

I think that most of the criticisms Doug makes of Obama are fine. But then you have to say, okay, Obama goes to AIPEC [America Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby group] and he genuflects, like John McCain and Hillary Clinton, so let’s go support the pro-Palestinian candidate. But there isn’t one.

So what I think many on the left are actually arguing for, and there is a case that one can make, is just don’t stand in elections. That the whole thing is corrupt and bankrupt, and that is it.

But if you are going to stand in elections and you are standing to win and be viable, then there is a context there that Obama inherits and didn’t create.
I think that it is very important to criticise Obama from the left. But if one leaves it there, then you don’t really get what I think is a crucial question for the left: how do we get from where we are now to this more progressive society? How do we get a better foreign policy?

Over the last eight years there has been a sense of despondency and frustration, and Obama’s candidacy is both the recipient of and a driver for the unleashing of that energy. There is a symbiotic relationship, I think, between Obama and his base.

The energy that you see in Obama’s base is among people who are desperate for something better, and that is what has enabled his candidacy to do so well. Which brings us to the question: are these people just deluded? Are we dealing with a massive, collective mania and false consciousness? Or do they see a possibility that they hadn’t seen in John Kerry or Al Gore?

The truth is that Obama has roused constituencies that had long been dormant, notably the black and the young. There is possibility in this – definitely the possibility of disappointment, but also the possibility of something better.

So we must ask ourselves two questions. First, are we going to abandon these people to disappointment, disillusionment and cynicism? Or are we going to engage them in a more progressive agenda that puts the pressure on Obama when he starts to flake? Do we provide him with critical support when he is starting to flake in certain areas already? Or do we decide cynical support or no support at all?

Second, who else? If you are on the left and you think that this is all delusional, all crazy, who else then brings 75,000 people out in Portland? Even for a half-way progressive programme, who else gets voter registration people working 12 hours a day in Louisiana? If not him at this moment, then who? Or what, or how?

Because in the five years that I have been here, and in the eight years since Bush came in, I haven’t seen as much possibility as I have now and if you don’t like this, you have to suggest something else. You have to go to Portland and say to those 75,000 people, you should be somewhere else. And they better go there, because otherwise all you are doing is sending them home.

Betsy Reed We are always looking at Democrat politics as both the more grass-roots and radical elements and the corporates, and these are very disparate elements. The former was in the forefront during the primaries in a very real way, in the form of the small donations that propelled Obama’s campaign, the sort of grass-roots, more progressive elements that have played a key role in bringing out those 75,000 people to those rallies, and really energising that black vote. This could completely revolutionise the electoral maths. There is discussion that a state like Georgia could actually be contested by Democrats.

That is nothing to shrug at, but the other thing that we have started to see more recently is that the corporate-Democratic hold on the party becomes painfully apparent when it shifts into general election mode. With the demise of the Hillary Clinton campaign, Obama has folded in that establishment element into his campaign, in particular with the hiring of Jason Furman as his campaign’s economic policy director.

If that is where we are beginning, it is pretty depressing. There have been some nods to the left. Obama’s people have mentioned the names of some progressive economists, but the people who are beginning to surround him now are similar to those who created the Clinton phenomenon.
The key question is ‘what role can the left play?’ We should have some leverage based on the grassroots energy that his campaign really depends on – he needs those volunteers.

The Obamamania thing was thrown around a lot by Clinton supporters, but there is something to it; there is a bit of hero-worship. It’s hard not to get a crush on the guy when you hear him because he is an amazing talker. And there is this desire to believe in him and not really think about what might be going on, and what might be wrong with him, and how we might try to push him in our direction.

Jo-ann Mort I want to start by picking up on something that Gary said: ‘We can have a discussion like this if we are in Sweden.’ But in Sweden the social democrats lost power and the conservatives are in power; it just shows how weak the left is globally. Even where there has been pretty much left-wing hegemony all of these years, there is a crisis of what defines the left and where the balance of power is.

I have been incredibly excited about Obama from the beginning. It is an amazing thing that America would nominate someone like him, and do it enthusiastically, and that he in fact may end up being the president. Now, as someone on the left, did I see him, and the excitement that I feel for him, as part of my left-wing agenda? No. I have never been one to think that the president of the US is the standard bearer for the left.

However, I think that now, in 2008, having lived through eight years of the Bush administration, an Obama presidency is a prerequisite for there to be any left at all in this country, and certainly for us to have the power in terms of the unions, working-class issues and opposition to corporatist economics.
The fact is that we, as the left collectively, are as weak as we have ever been. The only way that we are going to be able to build power is to have some breathing space in Washington, in the White House, that is going to make a difference.

I honestly don’t know if I can survive four years of John McCain. Just recently, I got an email to say that the US supreme court, Bush’s supreme court, made a decision that had struck down a California law that barred publicly-funded companies from speaking out against unions. We have a supreme court, a federal judiciary that is as anti-union as we could ever imagine, and then we have all of the regular Tory agencies against them. Bush has never had a meeting with the head of the AFL-CIO or the head of Change to Win, the two labour federations.

The current labour secretary thinks that her job is to investigate union leaders for corruption and block laws that would support workers’ rights on matters like health and safety in the workplace. So we need a good, elected Democrat in the White House, and I happen to think Obama is a centre-left candidate who will govern on the centre-left.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t do any of those things that Betsy and others have said in terms of keeping his feet to the fire. But we do have to look at the Jason Furman appointment in relation to how you get elected. This is still a very close election, but whereas McCain is moving to the right to sharpen his base – which to me shows that he is in trouble – Obama is moving to the centre, which is where you get the 50-plus-1 per cent of the votes you need to win.

The quick response to Furman’s appointment from trade unionists and others also made a big difference. Obama has pointed out that his economic team also includes Jared Burnstein from the Economic Policy Institute [a left-leaning think tank, which is close to the trade unions]. Robert Reich [Clinton's labour secretary] has also been quite outspoken about the Furman appointment.

Do I have any illusions that the pro-Wall Street, pro-free trade agenda is not going to be the agenda leading the day? No, but that is because the labour movement is so weak.

The only way we are going to be able to strengthen the labour movement is to be able to strengthen laws, to allow workers the right to organise and allow workers to take back the power that they need. And I feel very strongly that the only way that is going to happen is to get Obama into the White House.

Ta-Nehisi Coates I’m going to talk about the most obvious thing for me, which is Obama as a black president.

We have to face the fact that at the end of the primary this man was commanding a 98 per cent majority in the African American community. To get 90 per cent of black people doing anything, much less going to the polls and going to a voting booth, that doesn’t involve Densel Washington, Electric Sly etc is a tremendous thing.

I have many reservations too. Obama is a man who is expressing nothing explicit, nothing tangible – a great racial transcendent, in fact, and this may offer an excuse to those who don’t want to talk about race to completely get out of the discussion.

Despite this, we still have to stand back and ask: what sort of condition are we in now? What sort of world are we in that he is commanding 90 per cent? What you have to face up to is that African Americans have really paid the price of the last eight years – when you look at Katrina, or the Iraq war.

The possibility of the most famous African American in the world not being an entertainer or a ball player is really encouraging. As an African American, you come home and what you see on TV is always bad news with your face on it, about a black person defiling some child, or getting arrested, always really bad news.

The idea that you come home, you turn on the TV and find Barack Obama on there beating the crap out of John McCain – I don’t know what that is worth, I don’t know how that measures against economic policy, or anything like that, but that is a cause for some sort of optimism.

I live up in Harlem, and everywhere you go there are Barack Obama posters. I was at this great event called ‘Real Men Cook’ this Saturday, and all the people who came up to speak had this great excitement and optimism in the African American community that I have not seen in a long time. For all of my criticisms of Barack, it is very hard for me to dismiss that and say that it just isn’t worth anything.

Doug Henwood When it comes down to it, Obama is just another Democrat with a sleazy real estate guy in his past, and the level of hope that people are mounting around him is just extraordinary to watch.

In terms of a president that can move us away from uncritical support of Israel – well, I’m afraid that a guy who’s middle name is Hussein is going to go out of his way to prove that he is not that guy, so I think that is another example of misplaced hopes.

Now people point to the degree of enthusiasm and support that he has drawn out, and that is interesting because the people who are so enthusiastic about supporting him are perhaps ahead of him, and perhaps ahead of what our judgment is of what the American population is willing to accept.

Maybe the working class really are pissed off, maybe they are ready for something more progressive than what we think they are, so that kind of mobilisation and enthusiasm is very encouraging in itself.

But I think that we need to prepare for the fact that these people are going to be very disappointed when they see what kind of government he runs. I think we have to be prepared for the disillusionment that comes, and be ready now, think about how we talk to people. It may take a year or two for people to realise how disillusioned they are but we have to be ready to talk to them when they are.

Gary Younge Well I think being on the left you are always prepared for disilluionment. That is the psychological nature of the left.

The challenge is really to be prepared for hope, and to be prepared for something that is actually better. It is really about the possibility – but not the certainty – that these huge numbers of people that you are seeing turning up aren’t deluded.

Maybe they have seen a vehicle for what they want. And the issue is, do we become a vehicle for him? Or does he become a vehicle for us? And those two things are not mutually exclusive, or assured.

That doesn’t mean we should be uncritical until Obama wins. In the UK, Labour tried the ‘just shut up and wait for the guy to get elected, everything will be fine’ line, and then we ended up with Blair, Brown and the most decimated left that we have had for years.

You shouldn’t give people a blank cheque. The left shouldn’t be taken for granted, and the idea that McCain moving to the right is a sign of weakness should be treated cautiously. Actually, Bush didn’t move to the centre. What Bush did was rally his base. And there is a way to win where you rally your base, and you get everybody out: that is actually how Bush won twice, not by moving to the middle.

Betsy Reed I think that there is some Obamamania out there. But I don’t think it is fair to say that he has run a content-less campaign. If you look at a lot of the speeches that he has given, he has a lot of ideas – although you might not agree with all of them. But in his challenge to trickle-down philosophy, he says there is something that government can do about the problems we face.

There is also his race speech about the legacy of racial pressures and what the responsibility of government is to respond to that. That is a different language from the one that we hear from Republicans, certainly, and it is a more progressive language than any we have heard from viable presidential candidates in my memory.

If you look back at Kerry, he didn’t even oppose the war. Sure, you can fault Obama for his war plan – I think that has been really under-scrutinised. In fact, Obama would preserve the green zone and the biggest embassy in world history. Basically, his plan would require anywhere from 20,000 to 80,000 troops to remain in Iraq.

Despite this, Obama has a broadly anti-war agenda and a platform, an opening for the anti-war movement, if he is elected, to push him to end the war.

This is an edited transcript of ‘A People’s President? Barack Obama and the left’, a discussion at the Brecht Forum, New York, on 19 June 2008. Transcript: Jennifer Nelson and Lena de Casparis

In five small Vermont villages, meanwhile, residents decided to impeach George Bush for lying about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and for sanctioning torture. After discussing whether they should fix some of the town’s pavements, for example, residents of Newfane voted 121-29 to instruct the state’s sole House legislator to file articles of impeachment against the president, alleging that Bush misled the nation into the Iraq war and engaged in illegal domestic spying. ‘It absolutely affects us locally,’ said Dan Dewalt. ‘It’s our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, who are dying.’

It is easy to dismiss Vermont as a quirky outpost. The home of Ben And Jerry’s right-on ice cream emporium, which sided with Maine against the rest of the country to vote against Franklin D Roosevelt in his 1936 election landslide, can hardly be called a bell weather state. But the votes of these small hamlets – few of which are larger than 2,000 in population – do reveal a popular mood of frustration with both the president and the war in Iraq that is struggling to find political expression in the mainstream.

A recent Zogby poll showed that 51 per cent of respondents agreed that Bush should be impeached if he lied about Iraq. That is a far greater percentage than believed Bill Clinton should be impeached during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Such views are making themselves known increasingly at a local level. The San Francisco board of supervisors voted for impeachment recently, as have some state Democratic parties, including those of New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

But finding even a minority of politicians to give these views voice at a national level is proving close to impossible. Take the notable exception of Russ Feingold. The Wisconsin senator recently introduced a motion of censure against the president over the use of illegal wiretapping that had been authorised by the president without court approval. A poll showed a small majority of Americans would support a censure. And yet the official Democratic party response to the motion was an awkward, at times quite pathetic, silence.

When questioned about the motion, Illinois senator Barack Obama said: ‘I haven’t read it.’ Former presidential hopeful John Kerry said: ‘I really can’t comment right now.’ Hillary Clinton, who usually leaves her teeth marks on the spotlight, literally ran away. In the three years since I’ve been reporting in America, this has been the dominant theme of the political landscape here: a discrepancy between popular political culture and the political class that means mainstream views are not being reflected in mainstream politics. Put more simply, the American people have been having enriching, substantive and progressive conversations that simply do not trickle up to the media or Congress and so are rarely heard either at home or abroad.

As a foreign correspondent, this has presented a problem. The news that the rest of the world has had from the US over the last few years is of a country seriously in need of a global Asbo. This was not an unreasonable impression. Bush’s election in 2000, followed by the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, created the perfect storm for a period of military aggression and nationalistic bellicosity that apparently knows no limits, moral or temporal. Bush has promised that the ‘war on terror’ could go on for ever.

Just a couple of months after I arrived in January 2003, the Republicans had won two Senate seats and held firm in the House of Representatives. They owned every branch of government bar the judiciary, which had nonetheless decided to ignore the democratic wishes of the people of Florida and crown Bush the resident-in-chief.
But this was not a full impression. I knew there were a lot of Americans opposed to the Bush agenda, not least because I am married to one. What I did not realise before coming here was that their number already amounted to a significant critical mass that would keep growing and morph into a radical, sizeable presence with neither leader, party nor any other sign of organisational coherence.

By the time I arrived in the country, 72 city councils, including Philadelphia, Austin, Chicago, Baltimore and Cleveland had passed anti-war resolutions. Membership of the country’s best known civil liberties advocates, the American Civil Liberties Unions, has surged by a fifth since 2001. Membership of the environmentalist group, the Sierra Club, has risen by 16 per cent since 2000. The readership of the left-wing Nation has virtually doubled. Polls showed that only a minority of Americans supported the war in Iraq without UN backing.

But all the mood music – the media, the flag-waving, the troops build-up – suggested uncritical and unswerving support for war, Bush and everything else that came with them. It was a constant struggle to square the packaged, mediated version of reality with what was actually going on across the US. On almost every central issue, from the war to impeachment, the nation is bitterly divided. If opposing Bush and what he stands for is really anti-American, as the right claims, then half of America stands guilty. The political culture and counter-culture have become so enmeshed, confused and evenly-balanced (numerically at least) that it is now impossible to tell which is which. It’s fairly obvious who has the power; it is now much harder to work out who has the influence.

This is not the regular, if justifiable, complaint about grassroots campaigns and concerns being given short shrift in the media and politics. That too is true. What has happened here is stranger than that. These were not just minority opinions that I felt should be aired. More and more, they were campaigns and viewpoints being marginalised even as they grew increasingly mainstream. A popular and at times encouragingly progressive public consciousness was being erased from public discourse even as it was being formed. Commentators and politicians were rewriting history before the events had even happened.

This is not just wishful thinking on my part. If the entire nation was gripped by a monumental militaristic episode, that would have saddened but not surprised me. But almost everywhere I went I saw clear tensions in the local, political and cultural fabric that were making themselves felt nationally.

There was Rocky Anderson, the mayor of Salt Lake City – the main city in the most Republican state in the country, Utah – who is in favour of gay marriage, against the war and committed to converting his city’s fleet to alternative-fuel vehicles in order to honour his commitment to meet Kyoto’s standards on greenhouse emissions by 2012. ‘You have to stand up, even at the risk of losing races,’ he told me. ‘Some things are more important than winning a race.’ But he kept on winning.

There was the gay community in the town of Springfield, Missouri, fighting back against homophobia. ‘We went door to door campaigning,’ says Randy Doennig, president of the local gay rights group, Promo, talking about the mobilisation against a referendum outlawing same sex marriage in the state. ‘That’s the first time we had gone door to door about anything; the first time we were engaged on a local level and we had to talk about gay marriage. They don’t take us seriously because we haven’t asked them to take us seriously.’

There were immigrants, legal and undocumented, travelling through the country on a Freedom Ride. ‘First of all I can’t go back because people are dependent on me for money,’ says Ana Amaral from Angola. ‘But secondly, why should I?’ she says, gesturing to the people on the bus. ‘We made this place.’

All this fighting talk has represented more than just resistance. It has been effective, active opposition. But with no one to voice it in the political establishment it has emerged either on the streets – as with the huge marches against anti-immigration legislation in March; in the polls – opposition to the war keeps growing as support for Bush keeps diminishing; or outbursts like Howard Dean’s insurgent candidacy during the Democratic primaries.

These movements do not represent a majority but a vocal, committed and energetic minority capable of mobilising huge numbers for a cause they believe in. The same could be said of the Christian right. But there is one crucial difference. The Christian right is tied to a party with a strategic overview of the coalition of forces it needs to gain and retain power, and which understands the need to maintain a symbiotic relationship with its base. Progressives do not.

In the absence of this electoral clout two things stand out: the huge potential that exists to construct a progressive alternative to the Bush agenda and the inability of the Democratic leadership to capitalise on it. From New England radicals in Vermont town halls to the undocumented workers on the streets of LA, there is a constellation of social movements emboldened by struggle and absent of leadership. The official response to Russ Feingold’s censure motion suggests a formal opposition lacking in principle and crippled by opportunism. The former have made Bush vulnerable; the latter still believe he is invincible.Gary Younge has been the Guardian’s New York correspondent since 2003. His new book, Stranger in a Strange Land, is published by the New Press, email ukinfo[AT]thenewpress

And so they knock on doors, asking people who have shown an interest in the anti-Bush campaign America Coming Together (ACT) what they believe the main issues in the election are (the war and healthcare for most), and giving them leaflets with a liberal analysis. For tax reasons ACT cannot lobby directly for Democratic candidate John Kerry, but there is no doubt it wants him to win. What happens to Kerry’s campaign is important. But what happens to the Devaneys, and hundreds of thousands like them, is crucial.

Kerry spent most of his election campaign promising that nothing would change if he were elected. At one stage he said that even if he knew when he voted for war what he knows now (that there would be no UN support, no WMD, huge civilian casualties and civil war in Iraq) he would still have done the same

Only in the last month, after Bush was gaining what appeared to be an unassailable lead, did Kerry shift tack and slam the war as a colossal mistake. And only then did his challenge once again become viable. At most his election might improve some elements of US foreign policy and lessen the gap between rich and poor at home; at the very least it would mean things get worse more slowly and less dramatically. Much like Tony Blair’s victory in 1997, the left’s hope in the US is invested not in Kerry winning but Bush losing.

If we are truly interested in the possibility of US imperialism being checked we must look to the likes of the Devaneys: people who have been foot soldiers in the US’s own civil war over the past 18 months. New Hampshire, a state that Bush won in 2000, and which is by no means radical, is full of them.

There is Mary-Jo McCarthy from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, whose husband, Ryan, is serving in Iraq as a reservist. She has joined the Band of Sisters: a campaign comprising women with partners in Iraq who are opposed to the war. ‘I’ve never been politically involved before,’ she says. ‘But I felt so strongly that the most supportive thing we can do for the troops right now is vote for John Kerry.’

There is Claire O’Neill: ‘We used to shout at the TV a lot, but then I felt I couldn’t just sit back and let this happen. The bigger picture is too important.’

And there is the congressional candidate Granny D: the 94-year-old great-grandmother of 16 is campaigning across New Hampshire, slamming the war and big business. ‘The corporations have taken over,’ she said after a packed house party in the city of Laconia. ‘To become a powerful man today you have to sell your soul.’

These people are not a majority, or even anywhere close to it. But, like the religious right that has had such a huge influence on the Bush administration, they are a vocal and energised sizeable minority.

The past 18 months has seen a surge in independent political activity in the US. Organisations like ACT and the grass-roots campaign MoveOn.org have provided forums for political congregation, discussion and action. After the release of Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11, for example, MoveOn.org invited its web-based activists to host parties at their homes to discuss the film and how people could capitalise on the issues it raised. The nearest to where I live in New York was just three doors down. And so my wife and I trooped along with a pizza to discuss politics with around 20 strangers. Halfway through, we turned towards the computer to hear a live address by Moore, who thanked us for going to see his film and called on Kerry not to tack too far to the right. Afterwards people were asked to sign up to make phone calls the next week to register voters in Florida. My wife went along and registered one voter.

How productive all this was is not clear. But its primary importance was that it created an avenue for political debate without dictating an agenda for political action. As a bottom-up surge of like-minded motivated people, it could have gone anywhere, including nowhere at all.

Such phenomena are not new in the US, but the fact that they are gaining a (limited) electoral expression is. At the beginning of the year just such a movement, headed but not controlled by anti-war candidate Howard Dean, threatened to make Dean the Democratic Party’s candidate for the election. Dean activists around the country used the internet to establish makeshift political communities. Once again, I needed only walk a few minutes from my home for the chance to meet with like-minded strangers. During a ‘meet-up’ in a bar in Brooklyn I heard two men who had never met before discuss how they were going to travel the more than 1,000 miles to campaign for Dean in Iowa. Others hand-wrote letters to Democrats elsewhere in the country, calling on them to back Dean. No one told them what to write: there were no Dean staffers to be seen. ‘When I called head office to ask if I could do certain activities they said, “you can do whatever you want”,’ said Marystarr Hope, who organised the Brooklyn meet-up.

To put this all down to the web is to miss the point. The internet facilitated these grass-roots efforts, but it was the opportunity to be part of moulding your own campaign, rather than accepting one off the shelf, that made them so attractive and effective. The day before the Brooklyn meet-up I was in Iowa City. It was a week before the caucuses there, and the Dean, Kerry and Edwards campaigns were in the same building. When I approached the Dean campaign it facilitated my requests, passing me mobile phones to speak to ex-Nader voters and non-voters. When I visited the Kerry and Edwards campaigns I was told nobody was permitted to answer a question (not even a simple, ‘why did you join this campaign?’) without prior authorisation from head office. Dean supporters had their own voice and were encouraged to use it; the absolute opposite was true for those backing Kerry.

The Dean campaign was not democratic – activists had no say in Dean’s platform – but it was pluralistic, chaotic and empowering. The question is what will happen to those activists after the election. If Bush wins will they sink into despondency? If Kerry wins will they dissolve or be co-opted? Or will they maintain an independent progressive presence regardless, striving to hold whosoever wins to account?

Claire O’Neill and the Devaneys were all once Dean supporters, as were most of the other ACT volunteers I met in Derry. The energy they had harnessed earlier in the year had not dissipated but gone in new directions. O’Neill is now standing for the state legislature and encouraging others to do so. If these people continue and succeed it will be despite Kerry. The Democratic nominee has clearly distanced himself from every element of independent political activity, including the anti-war movement and the demonstrations in New York against the Republican Party convention. Yet these are the very forces that are making Kerry’s campaign viable, providing focus for the Democratic base.

Meanwhile, those who once claimed to lead these activists have essentially been co-opted and then dismissed. Dean and fellow Democratic nomination hopefuls Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton quickly fell into line after they were defeated. In retrospect they clearly gave their support too cheaply. They might have insisted that Kerry campaigned on an anti-war ticket. But their desire for ‘unity’ was so strong that they forced their supporters to gather round an appalling agenda.

And the fact that the MoveOn.org meeting I attended resulted in little more than an interesting conversation about a film and a few registered voters suggests that such web-constructed political communities may be too makeshift. They deal with immediate concerns well, but seem to have little direction beyond that. Given how pressing the immediate concern is – ie, getting rid of Bush – this should come as no surprise. But if you are looking for a source of hope from US politics this year, then you should forget Kerry and the polls; it’s the Devaneys you need to watch.

Little wonder then that he had trouble figuring out what all the fuss was about after a meeting with “moderates’ in Bali during his whistle-stop tour of Asia in October. For reasons Bush could not quite grasp, his vision of the US as a benign superpower spreading democracy through a reluctant Middle East was received with polite scepticism, even among those nations and leaders he considered allies. “Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?’ he asked one of his aides. “I’ve been saying all along that not every policy issue needs to be dealt with by force.’

Even for those of us who cannot afford to pay people to sift and select the news for us, finding out what is really going on in the world is difficult. The issue for the left is not objective sources (what on earth would they be?) but reliable, honest sources that relate to the needs of the many rather than the interests of a few; sources that may not always give us the news we want to hear or views that we agree with, but which provide us not only with a framework for understanding what is happening but also with options for what we might do about it.

This is the strength of alternative newspapers in general and Red Pepper in particular. Over the past decade they have helped create a refuge for those who thought that either the world was going crazy or they were. They have anchored us to a value system rapidly being washed out by the spin cycle of corporate PR and political manipulation. They are keen to spot political trends without wishing to follow political fashion.

And as the dislocation between the political class and popular consciousness becomes increasingly pronounced both in Britain and globally, so the need for alternative media grows exponentially. Britain is a country where the left can produce the largest demonstration in the nation’s history and yet find that neither of the two main parties takes up its cause. We live in a world where not one nation, including the US, supported bombing Iraq without UN approval but the bombing happened anyway.

When Red Pepper was set up in 1994 “alternative’ was used as a synonym for “minority’; as time goes on the word’s meaning becomes increasingly literal. At the same time, Red Pepper is increasingly in step with the majority.

The proliferation of the alternative media through the internet has, to an extent, democratised the means of communication, providing cheaper outlets for left organisations and individuals as well as the capacity to build mass, spontaneous, movements with clicks and sends. From texts to blogs to new websites, the left has managed to exploit new media to confront exploitation. It was the text messages and emails that buzzed around Spain in the wake of the March bombings that explained how the right-wing government in Madrid was lying about the source of the terrorism. Within days that government was out. Similarly, it was the internet that helped create the closest thing we have seen so far to an electoral expression of the anti-war movement: Howard Dean’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. In all sorts of ways those who present themselves as mainstream have become marginal and those once dismissed as marginal have more in common with the mainstream.

But as supply has become freer for new media it has become more restrictive for the old. With big chains controlling distribution and display, the chances of smaller, radical magazines making it past their first few months are rare. This financial restraint on our freedom of speech has become a banal fact of life for the left in Britain, but go to the Continent and you’ll see that it is anything but normal.

From the war in Iraq to racism in Britain, and from privatisation to globalisation, the right-wing shift in the political agenda has become so profound and progressive expectations are so lowered that it is, at times, difficult to know how to engage. When Red Pepper was launched Britain was still reeling from the election of one British National Party councillor in London’s East End; today we have around 20 dotted around the country, and the Labour Party regards it as a triumph that there are not more.

We need alternative media to keep debate thriving in print at a time when it is being extinguished in Parliament and elsewhere in the press; we need them to raise the bar of what is regarded as acceptable or desirable, and to challenge the skewed version of “normality’ pumped out by the regular press.

At no point has this been clearer than with the reporting of the Iraq war. Take the toppling of Saddam’s statue. To those who had marketed the bombing of Baghdad as an act of liberation – ie, most of the mainstream press – this was their moment. If they were in search of a symbol for the war, they might have chosen the sight of British and US diplomats leaving the UN shamefaced, having failed to secure international support for it. Or they could have chosen the global outpouring of opposition to the war on 15 February, when I stood next to New Yorkers holding phones to their ears and finding that they were in a global community of millions even if a minority at home.

But they chose the statue, because it told a story of Iraqi self-emancipation that they wanted to convince the world was true. The fact that the pictures had been cropped to make a few dozen men look like a mob and that it conveniently occurred just outside the Sheraton Hotel, where many of the press corps stayed, was left to a handful of regular journalists and the alternative press to broadcast.

One year later, with civilian Iraqi casualties high, no weapons of mass destruction found, Saddam captured and a huge resistance showing signs of uniting Shiah and Sunni in their hatred for the US, the networks and newspapers ask: “What went wrong?’

What went wrong was that the mainstream media wilfully mistook a stage-managed, purely symbolic event for a transformative, substantial one and then sold that interpretation on. Without alternative media challenging not only the premise of the image but also the process by which it came about, many would have been none the wiser.

“Facts speak only when the historian calls on them,’ wrote the historian EH Carr in What Is History? “It is [the historian] who decides which facts to give the floor and in what order or context. It is the historian who has decided for his own reasons that Caesar’s crossing of that petty stream the Rubicon is a fact of history, whereas the crossing of the Rubicon by millions of other people before or since interests nobody at all.’

For “historian’ read “journalist’. What masquerades as objectivity is in fact and always a series of choices, priorities. When in December 2001 Red Pepper placed the available names of the civilians killed by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, it made clear its priorities.

This has been a tough 10 years to keep such priorities in the public domain. But there is a necessary psychological optimism that goes with progressive politics: its culture hinges on the notion that a better world is possible and that a critical mass of people could rise to the challenge of creating it; it is rooted in the belief that there is an essential decency in humanity, which – given sufficient political space, economic resources and cultural capital – can over-ride naked, narrow and short-term self-interest.

The last 10 years have provided the odd glimpse that such optimism has been justified; the WTO demonstrations in Seattle and the establishment of a multiracial democracy in South Africa being just two examples. But the general trend of events, from the evisceration of the Labour party to the election of Bush, has left us on the defensive.

It is in periods like these that an alternative left publication is most difficult to produce. Physically getting it out is a political act in itself. It demands not just commitment, but a mixture of coercion and cajoling to turn high ideals and low funds into a professional product.

But it is also in such times that an alternative, left journal is most vital. Extinguish the flame and there is no torch to pass on in more hopeful times. Lose communication and we are all isolated. Provide a radical filter for world events, an alternative prism through which to examine the world, and you do not just produce a magazine; you help forge and sustain a community of activists and a tradition of resistance.